Megan says Abstract art is art that you can not make anything out . That is to say, there is nothing apparent in it that the artist is trying to portrait. There are two line families, the curved and the straight. That is, a zig zag, a straight line, etc would be in the straight line family, and your curves like swirls and rounded lines would be in the curves.
March 2014 Archives
Megan is learning Yo Soy, which means "I am" and Mi pelo es (my hair is). Yo soy una nina and Yo soy baja(o for masculine). Mi Pelo es liso (straight) and mi pelo es Largo (long). Finally, she describes her eyes , "Mis ojos son cafe".
Megan was doing her daily writing on dinosaurs, so I took out Leslie's list of Prefixes and Suffixes and got Megan started using these index cards to come up with names of dinosaur. Then, I found a sheet where she picked a name and described it, such as why it was given this name, what did it like to do, what was its habitat, etc.
Today, Megan started a study on the Tender Bush Bean. She made two plants. One that will go in a well lit area and one which will go in a dark area. We are going to watch these plants for 14 days.
Megan's hypothesis, is that the dark one will die. It will probably germinate , but when it gets to the surface, it will not have enough light, so it will die. The light one is going to survive and it will grow into a full grown bean plant.
today we learned about the Ancient China. We learned that the people of Ancient China lived between the Yellow River and the Yangtze river in what was called the Yellow River Valley. This area stayed wet most of the time and so this is where a new kind of crop grew: rice. They used to live in seperate villages but a great leader called Huang- Di came and united the different villages of the Yellow River Valley into one Kingdom.
On page 48 , Megan is working with the "th" , "wh" blends, learning words like think, whip, path, bath, white , whale and thin. On page 49, she had to read the sentences and answer yes or no to them. The answer appear to be reasonable. She reads well now so she did this while I stepped out of the room.
Megan is now starting to add with carrying. This is not knew as she is doing it in life of Fred. This program does it in a neat manner. Here's a set of the problems: 3 + 7, 43 + 7, 243 + 7 , that is, it shows the steps in program. One thing I like with this program is that they have a fun activity. On page 41, she answered problems in a hat that has a letter on it. Then, below, she finds the corresponding answer and above that in a space she puts the letter. Today , it spelled out "Happy Birthday".
Megan supplied words to make a compound word, evergreen, playground, nightmare, cornmeal, eastward, shareware. Then, she read a paragraph and answered the questions. She had trouble with one of them , but I reasoned with her about the answer. Then, she had to read sentences and answer (a or an) for each of them. Then, she had to complete a set of analogy like candy:sweet:: lemon: sour.
Then, she had to put the words of a sentence in the correct order. Finally, she had to read sentences and pick the correct form of the verb (is, are, am).
Megan, has part of her daily morning routine, is adding "Build a Problem flip book" on Time. Its a book with lots of top, middle and bottom flaps and you pick a scene in which you work out the elapsed time for. Megan draws the three to four clocks necessary and the time at each one to come at the final time. This is in her daily writing composition book.
Today Megan did the story sequence for the story. On strips with sentences written in which an animal is missing, Megan read the sentences and had to try and remember the animal in question. The only one she truly forgot was flea danced a jig.
Megan did page 94. She has done all the pages leading up to this and I will try to write them all up. On this page, she had to find out how many total babies a meerkat would have if they have 5 babies each year for seven years. She put 60 at first and then I helped her. I worked with her to realize that this was 7X5 or 5X7. Then, I wrote out seven 5's and had her skip count her way through this problem. When we were done, we skip counted by 7's.
The second problem was to determine a meerkat's total number of toes if he/she has four toes on each foot.
Megan reduce this to 8 times 2 . I told her this is the same as 8 + 8. She soon got the right answer.
Megan did a couple of word ladders today. One with words sit, hit, hat, had, hand, sand and stand and another one with the words hair , hail, fail , fall, ball, bald.
On these pages Megan is describing colored in squares as owe and uncolored as "have". After this, she adds and subtracts single digit numbers. She also adds double and triple digit numbers with no tens or ones, like 40 + 40 and 300 + 500. Then, she solves some problems for variables (single digit adding).
Megan is doing a combination of many math curriculums, Miquon, Math-u-see and now Singapore. I am trying to figure out the best fit for my daughter. I thought the second book of Math-u-see was getting too easy, but I realize that leaving it behind is a mistake as it reinforces through repetition, which is something Megan seems to need. Anyway, on this page of Singapore, Megan is learning to add double digit numbers without any carrying or borrowing. Problems like 34 +3, 45-23, etc.
Megan is learning from Math-u-see that owe, means you are subtracting a given amount and is colored grey and "have" (in white) means this is how many you start with . It's a color system they use so that later the kids can understand the problem. She did some problems like this , just counting how many grey and how many white boxes there were. Then, She did some adding and some subtracting problems. Since there were not many subtraction problems, I added a row upon her request. then, she did the problems they had. On page 252, She did more adding problems. Weird. There should be more subtraction. I am not a big fan of this book, but she does it periodically.
We studied the location of Scotland and France on a map and also discussed the location of the Appalacian Mountains. We then sorted animals according to what category they belong to , such as mammal, bird, insect, reptile, etc. She still needs to write down some features of each. She also learned some things that came to America from Scotland, such as the Lockness Monster and their music and dress.
For the last few weeks , Megan has been learning opposites in Spanish. such as Adentro (inside) and Afuera (outside), Arriba(up) and Abajo (down), Lento (slow) and rapido (fast), Limpio (clean) and Sucio (dirty)